Dear Lynne,

Well, I didn’t expect it was going to take me this long to check in, but it looks like we are approaching the two year mark. Amazing. It seems as if I left school last summer.

I had hoped to write you and tell of my brilliant therapist position in a high powered clinic, but that hasn’t happened yet. At present I’m working as a family therapist for a crisis center in a little Navy town called xxxx. I take the ferry to work, which takes an hour, and I work with adolescents and their families. The problems run the gamut from incest and physical abuse to teenage car thieves and substance abusers—a decidedly un-cheery group of kids and families. I have had to use every trick you and everybody else at Cal Fam taught me and I have come up with a couple of my own.

You know, that is what this letter is really about, I have come to realize how powerful the two years I spent with you were. So much of the training that I have applied up here I can trace directly back to you. I am rather amazed at how much I absorbed.

One of the frustrations while I was your apprentice was that I thought so much of what you were teaching me was not getting absorbed, but it seems I was wrong—and not just techniques but the very basic practices of positive regard for others and willingness to stick with people when they go through the wringer. Oh I know that lots of big time therapists have written books on all this but you were the person who showed me how to put the human touch in it. You were the one who taught me the difference between tricks and doing real therapy.

Really what I am saying is that I can’t thank you enough for believing in me and giving me all that you did. What you gave me I couldn’t buy at Cal Fam or any other graduate program. If I ever have an apprentice I hope I can be half as skilled a guide as you were for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, that’s what I wanted to say. I do hope all is well with you and all you are doing. I think fond thoughts of you.

Bye for now.

M.M.